# Chris Degnan

![Chris Degnan](/resources/cognition/portraits/chris-degnan.webp)

CRO at Cognition (Devin, Windsurf); Snowflake's first sales hire and founding CRO  
Cognition  
Redwood City, California, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Chief Revenue Officer (Leadership)
- Joined: Oct 2026
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Chief Revenue Officer, Snowflake Computing

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan
- X: @cwdegnan
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- His Cognition announcement credits CEO Scott Wu and co-founder Russell (Kaplan) and says customer stories about Devin convinced him: "Hearing how customers spoke about how Devin is transforming their business made me realize this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." (https://x.com/cwdegnan/status/2105348199892598886)
- Current role is Chief Revenue Officer at Cognition. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan)
- Brought longtime partner Chad Peets and RPT Partners with him into Cognition hiring; Peets later said RPT now focuses exclusively on OpenAI, Cognition and Harvey. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chadpeets_earlier-this-year-i-made-the-strategic-decision-activity-7518750257044860928-3w5z?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHChknoBPS3_ET2jhYNHGZQZ_sbC82_Bn7Y)
- Posted on LinkedIn: "After a noisy week for me, it was incredibly kind of Nasdaq and Jack Cassel to welcome me to Cognition.  Never been more motivated in my life.  Let's go!!!!!" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chris-degnan_after-a-noisy-week-for-me-it-was-incredibly-activity-7511818878826594305-3DpM?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHChknoBPS3_ET2jhYNHGZQZ_sbC82_Bn7Y)
- Public headline says "Chief Revenue Officer at Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan)
- Co-authored the book Make It Snow with Snowflake CMO Denise Persson on how Snowflake built its go-to-market organization from zero to billions. (https://www.makeitsnowbook.com/)
- Sales Leader with experience in Storage, Analytics, & Security.

Specialties: Data analytics, Data Platform, back-up, Security, sales, sales management, business intelligence, public cloud, hybrid cloud, ETL, Big Data, Hadoop, Access Governance, Identity Management, Provisioning, SSO, AWS, Azure, GCP; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan)
- Previous roles include Chief Revenue Officer at Cognition; Board Member at A Security; GTM Advisor at ICONIQ; Board Member at Gambit Security; Author at Makeitsnowbook.com; Board Member at PointFive; Partner at RPT Partners; Advisor at Giga. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan)
- A timestamped segment covers Chris' most impactful decisions at Snowflake. (https://review.firstround.com/executive-function-chris-degnan-cro-snowflake/)
- Chris Degnan's LinkedIn is listed as https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan/. (https://review.firstround.com/executive-function-chris-degnan-cro-snowflake/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan/)
- Chris Degnan authored a Snowflake blog post titled 'Secrets of Gen AI Success: Real-World Customer Stories and Outcomes' dated Oct 3, 2024. (https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/authors/chris-degnan/)
- Chris Degnan co-authored a Snowflake blog post titled 'Snowflake Acquires Night Shift Development, Inc. to Accelerate Growth in US Public Sector' dated Sep 19, 2024. (https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/authors/chris-degnan/)
- Chris Degnan authored a Snowflake blog post titled 'Consumption-based Pricing: Ensuring Every Customer's Value and Success' dated Sep 16, 2021. (https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/authors/chris-degnan/)
- Location is Redwood City, California, United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan)
- Chris Degnan holds a BA from the University of Delaware. (https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/authors/chris-degnan/)

## Experience
- Chief Revenue Officer at Cognition (Oct 2026 - Present): We believe the purpose of technology is to expand human capacity — not by replacing meaningful work but by working alongside people as an exponential collaborator, helping them think deeper and move faster. We build tools for software creation because software shapes nearly every aspect of modern life. Cognition helps engineers operate more like architects: strategizing, designing systems, and focusing on problem-solving, while agents handle the repetitive engineering work.
Devin plans, writes, tests, and ships production code on its own, working inside your codebase and the tools your team already uses. Devin is deployed at some of the largest and most complex institutions in the world.
- Board Member at A Security (Jan 2026 - Present): The offensive security and remediation platform to protect against weaponized AI.
- GTM Advisor at ICONIQ (Oct 2025 - Present): Helping build the next generation of world-class GTM teams.
- Board Member at Gambit Security (Oct 2025 - Present)
- Author at Makeitsnowbook.com (Sep 2025 - Present)
- Board Member at PointFive (Feb 2025 - Present)
- Advisor at Giga (Oct 2025 - Sep 2026)
- Advisor at Factory (Aug 2025 - Sep 2026): Helping build the next great company.
- Advisor at Watershed (Jul 2025 - Sep 2026)
- Advisor to Chief Executive Officer at Snowflake (Mar 2025 - May 2025)
- Chief Revenue Officer at Snowflake Computing (Nov 2013 - Mar 2025): Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud — a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single and seamless experience across multiple public clouds. Join Snowflake customers, partners, and data providers already taking their businesses to new frontiers in the Data Cloud. Snowflake.com.
- Board Member at Clumio (Jan 2020 - Sep 2022): Clumio has reimagined enterprise backup and recovery, taking full advantage of the scale, economics, and elasticity of the public cloud to give you a new and game-changing backup experience. Clumio eliminates the complexity of managing infrastructure, on-premise and in the cloud, to deliver secure and authentic SaaS.
- VP Western Region at Aveksa (Acquired by EMC/RSA July 2013) (Jul 2012 - Nov 2013): Aveksa is the market leader for business-driven identity and access management.  In Q1 2013, total revenue for Aveksa increased 134% over total revenue for the same period in the prior year. License and maintenance revenue increased 207% over Q1 2012. The revenue split in Q1 was 79% license and maintenance, and 21% services, demonstrating that Aveksa's Identity and Access Management solutions require minimal customization and are designed for rapid time-to-implementation value.---  What this all means is we are growing and hiring in the west!  Sales Directors & Sales Engineers to support our growth.  Great time to be a part of the Aveksa team!!
- District Sales Manager- Select Accounts Norcal at EMC (Jun 2008 - Jul 2012): My team manages 175 select accounts in the Northern California region.  We represent the entire EMC product & services portfolio.  Our business is growing 30% year over year and we are tasked with helping our customers manage their data growth, disaster recovery requirements, application performance requirements, security, and overall reduction in cost to run the infrastructure.
- Account manager at EMC (Apr 2004 - Jun 2008): Sales rep for San Francisco selling EMC Hardware, software, & Services
- Account Rep at Informatica (Sep 2002 - Apr 2004): Sales rep
- Corporate Account Manager at Covalent Technologies (Aug 2000 - Sep 2002): Covalent was the market leader for Apache/Tomcat support.  Was acquired by Springsource who is now a part of VM Ware

Sold software & support bundles for Apache/Tomcat
- Sales at Smartage.com (Sep 1999 - Aug 2000): advertising sales for smartage.com
- Management Trainee at Franklin Templeton (Jul 1998 - Dec 1999): Rotated through HR and the institutional sales group.
- Recruiter at Aerotek (Oct 1997 - Jun 1998): Recruiter for the Onsite group at Aerotek.  Focus was on adminstrative assistants.

## Education
- University of Delaware - BA, HR - (Jan 1993 - Dec 1997): sigma nu Fraternity

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan
- https://x.com/cwdegnan
- https://www.iconiq.com/growth/insights/iconiq-welcomes-chris-degnan
- https://commoncog.com/c/cases/degnan-product-market-fit-snowflake/
- https://review.firstround.com/executive-function-chris-degnan-cro-snowflake/
- https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/authors/chris-degnan/
- https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf
- https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/14/cognition-maker-of-the-ai-coding-agent-devin-acquires-windsurf/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAAAARaewBuqhBLJOMWDjvqYBHQTbUmPAzhas
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/cognition-ai-labs/posts
- https://x.com/cognition
- https://x.com/cwdegnan/status/2105348199892598886
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chadpeets_earlier-this-year-i-made-the-strategic-decision-activity-7518750257044860928-3w5z?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHChknoBPS3_ET2jhYNHGZQZ_sbC82_Bn7Y
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chris-degnan_after-a-noisy-week-for-me-it-was-incredibly-activity-7511818878826594305-3DpM?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHChknoBPS3_ET2jhYNHGZQZ_sbC82_Bn7Y
- https://www.makeitsnowbook.com/
- https://x.com/cwdegnan/status/1697701172260594125
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan/


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/chris-degnan · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people